I'm sure the paddles are a lot easier. All of my morse life however, was all about doing flashing light between ships. We all learned by doing morse by tone on headsets. As it would happen, they say that if you learn by tone you can do light faster, but if you learn on light you can't do tone. So we learned on tone.
But light is just by practical limitation far slower than tone. And we coastie quartermasters that learned light never got nearly so good at it as our navy signalman buds. The CG doesn't have a signalman rate like the navy. It was us QM's that had to fill in when light was needed. We also had to learn semaphore and flags. It is, however, a pretty cool way to communicate. As it turns out, the SINGLE most secure way to pass messages is via semaphore. Second most secure is flashing light. Third is by encrypted radio, and down from there.